The outlook for the world seems less than rosy sometimes.

Acapulco gets hit with a surprise Cat 5 and people there feel like no one is noticing. China has designs on Taiwan and may be assessing whether or not we’re distracted enough by events at home and elsewhere to make its move. Israel is not listening to anyone and forges ahead with a ground assault in Gaza. We bomb several sites in Syria. We suffer through another mass shooting; our schools are failing, as neglected and distracted students and inept, overwhelmed administrators are driving many teachers to leave the profession. Some big companies who should know better boast about being carbon neutral by 2050, which is still twenty-seven years away. Drug abuse is still a scourge; Vladimir Putin is happy to keep flying under the radar and make life hell for the people of Ukraine; Taylor Swift is a lightweight musician and marketing wunderkind who’s getting way too much attention, and

climate change is real.

So the banal, tired, maddening response from Republicans after another mass shooting is indeed offered out of an abundance of caution that they don’t piss off the NRA and a gun-loving base.

It’s not really about paying attention to mental health issues or protecting 2^nd Amendment rights, or the bad influence of video games, because all these things, minus the 2^nd Amendment excuse, exist in many other countries who don’t have near the incidence of gun violence we do.

One thing other countries do have is either an assault weapons ban or at least a serious background check, or both. And there are probably other factors in play in the U.S.- like living in a society where failure looms large, where we are distracted and isolated by so many things, always being fed a line about achievement and success and acquiring stuff.

Meanwhile, innocent people get butchered and all the Republicans can muster is the agonizingly familiar “thoughts and prayers” and “now’s not the time.” It’s glaringly obvious that there will never be a right time, so maybe it’s time, as Colbert suggests, that these waffling politicians’ non-committal responses become an issue in upcoming elections.

Sadly, there are already more guns than there are people in this country, but how can we stand by and let these horrors continue to happen, as if they’re just part of life here in wild west America?

Are we, homo sapiens, the pinnacle of evolution, or just the current version? Are we, as sentient beings, at the apex of the evolutionary process, or are we still on the journey and maybe somewhere out there in the vastness of the universe are our more evolved relatives? Versions 2.0 and 3.0 and so on (or would it be 1.1.2, 1.1.3…? I don’t know how that works).

In any event, what I’m wrestling with this morning is our uniqueness. Are we made in the image of God and there’s nothing more to come, or are we the predictable and natural culmination of processes thus far?

Different ways of asking the same question? I don’t know.  

If you have to study religion in the same manner one would study philosophy, if you need to be cerebral in order to fully grasp a religion’s tenets, if you have to study religious faith the way one studies calculus and trigonometry, then seminaries have their work cut out for them. They need extensive outreach programming; they need to get the word out that religious faith is not for the faint of heart or those who have no use for putting their thinking caps on.

For those who prefer feeling to thinking, religion can feel like being left high and dry, because you have to study history, you need to learn a new language. And if you don’t know the lingo, it’s difficult to be part of the conversation.

There must be some middle ground, or at least a starting point.

There’s a true story about Karl Barth, a learned Reformed theologian and prolific writer of some dense volumes of systematic theology who, late in life at a symposium in Chicago, was fielding questions from the audience. The final question was something like “What is the most important thing you’ve learned in your illustrious career?”

Instead of blowing it off as ridiculous and too difficult to answer, Barth closed his eyes and thought for a few moments. Then he looked up and smiled, and said, “The most important thing I’ve learned is this: Jesus loves me, this I know, for the Bible tells me so.”

Religious faith feeds introspection, contemplation, and expresson. So it’s no surprise that, among other things, we’ve turned it into a linguistic exercise that can intimidate and even short circuit any desire to explore.

Enter Dr. Barth, who has done us the favor of distilling copious amounts of verbiage, and given anyone who is interested a door through which to enter. As good a place as any to start, and to return to as often as needed.

Mike Johnson, new Speaker of the House.

A Trump stooge, a Jim Jordan clone without the name recognition. Friend of Old Energy, enemy of women’s reproductive rights, architect of the amicus brief leading to a lawsuit intended to undo the results of the 2020 election in four battleground states, and which wasn’t even given the courtesy of a written opinion by the Supreme Court; not averse to dismantling Social Security and Medicare/Medicaid, and in general another in a long line of fearful Christian conservatives who sound naïve and scared and not a little defensive, like they’ve lived sheltered lives and been fed a line.

All we really need to know is that he’s a Trump toady and acceptable to the Freedom Caucus.

It’s really hard to stomach Matt Gaetz and company as they gloat and plot their next moves.   

For various reasons, we want God to exist, but basically as someone who can come to the rescue– not a deity who demands our heart and soul, who commands obedience, who calls us to the straight and narrow, warns against distractions, claims love for all of creation, and then goes on vacation for centuries at a time.

I read the other day that Israel, surprisingly, is not a country full of religious zealots or even somewhat faithful, practicing Jews. The article drew attention to a distinction made between those who practice their Jewish faith and those who simply identify as being of Jewish descent. The latter was made to sound as if it was the larger of these two groups. 

One horrific way of looking at all that’s unfolded since October 7 could be that God doesn’t like this “backsliding,” this selective—in some ways non-committal—assumption of Jewish ethnicity. Maybe the Hamas attack is punishment, or a ghastly wake-up call meted out as a reminder that chosen comes with expectations and responsibilities and tradition.

And maybe this is why it’s hard to believe in God, or at least a God with such a long memory for being wronged. Always testing, harping on continuity, yet non-committal in his/her/its own right, who’s no better or different than Donald Trump, for crying out loud.

Jewish scripture is largely Christianity’s Old Testament. Jeremiah 31 and other passages aside, the Old Testament God can be a vengeful, angry taskmaster, remembering sin to the fourth generation. Maybe, just as “forty days and forty nights” simply means a long time, “fourth generation” simply means a lot of generations.

It’d be tempting, one might think, to just give up on a God who behaves this way. One can hold out for better days for only so long. And who needs a promised land when all it seems to offer is misery and pain and the need for constant vigilance, with “neighbors” who want you gone?

There is something we can learn from the Hamas attack on Israel. Israel’s guard was down, despite Netanyahu’s assurances to the contrary.

We seem to be in a similar place in this country—a political party in shambles, a former president with serious issues whose only mission is to save his own ass. His ignorant yet poisonous rhetoric and authoritarian aspirations continue to wreak havoc and confusion and inertia.

Trump and the rest have been nothing but a giant distraction for years now, and we’ve died from within as a nation because of this. We are weakened and have become vulnerable to opportunistic Russia or China or any number of others who find it in their interest to ally against us.

Whether or not we can right the ship is anyone’s guess.

My train of thought as I laid in bed at 4am the other morning was along the lines of trying to organize my feelings about church, and why it isn’t doing anything for me on those rare occasions when we go.

It didn’t take long for the train to go from “worship is just familiar and formulaic and rote” to the default rant… “if God is love, why is there so much viciousness and violence and horrific death in the world among people who also believe in God and cry out to him or her when they are angry and frightened and homeless and being butchered by people who also say they love God, or at least praise his name a lot?” What lessons are we to learn, what requirements are we to fulfill, before God makes an actual appearance?

What’s the key to finding peace, to living a life that pleases and appeases God and allows us to get through our days without worry and fear and hunger and deprivation? What’s the formula? There must be a formula. I know the answer lies in scripture somewhere, or at least that’s what I would be told over and over again until the cows come home and go back out again. But I’m beyond tired of getting that response, that… answer. That’s no answer, though it is a formula. And it turns out that formula doesn’t cut it.

I would love nothing more than to go to church one day and hear something that changes my perspective, gets me thinking, sparks a desire to keep looking and listening. But I’m not very hopeful of ever encountering such revelation. What I do know is that my life without church is emptier than it used to be. And my life with church was angst-ridden, because I was skeptical and saying things I wasn’t sure I believed.

It’s like we’re all trying to find the path that brings us comfort, helps us make sense of this life. We may give God the glory, thank God for this life we’ve been given. But at the end of the day, maybe we also find ourselves wondering if God has heard anything we’ve said or has anything to do with any of this. We wonder if God exists.

We look around, we see so much evil perpetrated in God’s name, and so many prayers going unanswered, so much time passing. And don’t give me the bullshit about we’re asking for the wrong things. Most aren’t asking for an easy life or a pot of gold. They’re pleading for faith and peace and health and food and a roof over their heads and a stop to this unending viciousness and hate. They’re asking why they were born to experience such unending misery, and they get no answers. Is it just their lot in life? Maybe it’s because there are no answers that shed any light or bring comfort.

Is this life nothing more than simply finding a path that makes sense, and then just trying to stay on it? I think we spend too much time looking for God, and not enough time coming to terms with the possibility that we’re on our own, evolving slowly, here for a short time and then gone. What are we supposed to learn along the way?

We can conceive of a supreme being, and have been told there is one. But is there, really? Evidence is mounting to the contrary. If all someone can say is “Hang in there,” or “What have you got to lose by believing?”, then I’m about ready to count myself just another agnostic.

Life coach? Sure, why not? 

There’s no shortage of advice out there, so one needs to weave or at least embrace a believable tale, in order to live this life with any sense of hope.

There are few things someone won’t try to monetize, including carbon offsets, or carbon credits. On first hearing, it may have one thinking NFTs, but on closer inspection, the concept was rooted in a certain tangible give and take.

Sadly, according to a lengthy, in-depth article in The New Yorker, the concept of paying a fee so someone somewhere can plant trees to offset your production of carbon dioxide has, predictably, devolved into something less effective and less observable and more just another money-making scheme for those who first conceived it. The real-world value has been lost in the haze of hard-to-quantify results.

It’s always been easy to think of carbon offsets as the feel-good option— “doing one’s part” without any of the pain of actually doing anything, as opposed to making certain lifestyle changes one might expect would accompany a reduction in one’s carbon footprint.

And then there’s the built-in suspicion that accountability would suffer sooner or later. It seems a palatable fix, though, for fossil fuel companies who pay their fees and then just keep drilling and selling petroleum products, with little regard for whether or not someone somewhere is actually following through and putting a dent in the amount of CO2 being spewed everywhere.